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Bernice Summerfield is a long-running franchise about the titular interstellar archaeologist from 2540, whose adventures take place across hundreds of books, audio plays and other media. Though it originated in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe and still takes place in the world of Doctor Who, the Bernice Summerfield line spun off into its own continuity over a decade ago.

The series focuses on classic adventure as well as the relationships between its characters. Benny travels across the universe to right wrongs, explore new planets, and prevent the end of the world on many occasions. Joining her are her ex-husband Jason Kane, her friend Bev, her son Peter, a Time Lord named Irving Braxiatel, and many other friends and adversaries. And unlike the Classic Doctor Who TV series, the Bernice Summerfield range tends to deal with very mature themes. The stories don't shy away from war, torture and death, but also celebrate love and sex (Benny being from an almost Free-Love Future) and show relationships in a realistic way.

In addition to the New Adventures novels, Bernice has an audio series produced by Big Finish. The Audio Play canon consists of adaptations of Benny's novels (sometimes directly, sometimes loosely) as well as original stories, frequently intersecting with other Big Finish Doctor Who ranges. With some stories labeled as a "Side Step" to canon, some being released as standalone specials and others referring to the events of the novels as taking place in the same continuity, the canon is all in all one hell of a tangled mess. This is made even more complicated by the fact that Braxiatel, Benny's employer, also appears prominently in the Big FinishGallifrey audios, where one or more versions of him may or may not exist at the same time and loop back in on their own timelines, crossing over with Benny's plot. Benny's video appearances include the CGI webcast "Dead and Buried", the live-action short film "The Crystal Conundrum" (alongside the Seventh Doctor) and Big Finish video trailers. With the division between "classic" and "new" Who being gradually erased in the 2010's, Bernice is also free to meet the modern Doctors, starting with an appearance alongside the Twelfth Doctor in the 2015 novel Big Bang Generation. All in all, the Bernice Summerfield canon has quite a few Broad Strokes, and can be approached from a wide variety of starting points.

Bernice Summerfield provides examples of the following tropes:

Acting for Two: Often. Prominently in The Mirror Effect, but also the clones (and robots!) in Glory Days, The Grel Escape and The Final Ammendment.

Adapted Out: Two of the early audio dramas (Birthright and Just War) were based on novels that originally featured the Doctor and his companions (Ace in both, Roz nad Chris in the latter). In the audio versions, they are dropped, and their roles are mostly taken by Jason.

Big Damn Kiss: Benny tackles the Eighth Doctor to the bed during their goodbye, after their first adventure together.

Bonus Material: Lisa and Sylvester filmed an unofficial Bernice & Seven adventure once, just for the heck of it. It's called "The Crystal Conundrum", features Jamie McCrimmon and a giant confused cat, and can be found on YouTube.

Creator Cameo: Being audio, there've been quite a few. Director Gary Russell in The Crystal of Cantus (although fans love to try and spot Russell's cameos, there's so many), writer Joseph Lidster in The Summer of Love, writer Mathew Sweet in Diet of Worms and writer Scott Handcock as Plato(!) in The Oracle of Delphi. Actually, from Epoch onwards, most of the bit parts are played by Gary Russell's co-director/producer/writer Scott Handcock, who seems to have taken over the role of being Big Finish's Alfred Hitchcock.

Crossover: Frequently. Benny's sometime boss, Braxiatel, is the same character that appears in Gallifrey; Ace occasionally visits; and Iris Wildthyme has popped up a time or two. The Daleks showed up in Death and the Daleks. The Doctor himself appears in 'The New Adventures of Bernice Summerfield' box-set.

Everybody is Single: Thanks, in part, to Executive Meddling. Benny marrying Jason really was going to be her happy ending and departure from the New Adventures. Then the editors lost their license to Doctor Who, and decided to re-launch it around Benny. Since she'd have to be single for romantic subplots, Benny and Jason's marriage was deep-sixed. They still love each other deeply, though, frequently have sex, and genuinely look out for each other throughout their adventures.

Free-Love Future: Almost, but not quite. Benny is an Ethical Slut, as is Jason, but both can get very jealous and value some level of monogamy. And people from Benny's university may be more enlightened about sexual matters than kids from our time, but there's still the occasional character who's in the closet, or ashamed of their sexual preferences.

Future Imperfect: Benny catches people out on their knowledge of history, and is not infrequently caught out herself. (She thought Star Trek was a documentary.)

"Groundhog Day" Loop: Benny becomes trapped in one in Random Ghosts, though unusually for the trope nobody actually remembers what happened the previous days. Instead, they're forced to look through footage taken by floating camcorders that's held outside of time...which becomes problematic when the cloud service is corrupted and the various recordings are scattered about, and nobody has any idea how long they've been within the loop. It's implied to have been a very long time.

Actress Lisa Bowerman has been the voice of Benny since the first audio dramas featuring the character were produced in 1998. However, she (coincidentally) resembled the artistic rendering of Benny dating back to the character's first appearance on the cover of the novel Love and War six years earlier. As Bowerman became more identified in the role, artistic renderings of Benny began to resemble her more, to the point where the 2010 CGI animated short Dead and Buried directly based Benny's appearance on that of Bowerman (with elements from earlier renderings tossed in). Then, beginning with Epoch in 2011, Big Finish just started using straight photographs of Bowerman for the cover art.

Depictions of other members of the cast though have only gradually moved towards this trope. In the novels, Jason was short-haired and blond◊ and then Stephen Fewell◊ was cast. The changes in illustrations that have resulted are obvious◊. Bev Tarrant was sketched to resemble Louise Faulkner and Peter looked a little like Thomas Grant (until they started using photographs on the covers, from which we can conclude that Peter looks exactly like Grant but with dog-ears-and-nose).

The only cast members that have escaped it are those playing non-human characters such as Harry Myers (Adrian/Hass), Stephen Wickham (Joseph/Doggles).

Escaping the Future: Everybody dies. But that's okay, because all of history (and established continuity) is completely rewritten.

Writing Around Trademarks: Not so much this as keeping distance from the parent series — Daleks and Cybermen can appear, but in stories not featuring the Doctor, nobody goes any further than occasional accidental references to the "Doct..." before stopping themselves.

You Cloned Hitler!: There's a Hitler clone working at the university library. He's a very nice chap with a keen interest in Jewish studies, which Benny thinks might be a case of overcompensating.

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